TEN THOUSAND THINGS

Ten Thousand Things is a cybernetic collective of light whose colour and rhythm shift according to the phase of the moon. Its base is a rock, its form is a tree whose leaves are made of real human hair and hyper-realistic flesh. In this multimedia installation, Singer yokes the genealogy of the sublime macrocosm to the abject microcosm: the cosmos gives birth to the earth, the earth gives birth to plants, plants give birth to human-animals which give birth to technology. Ten Thousand Things re-positions the strangeness of this post-human moment as a phenomena belonging to the evolution of the cosmos. Here, Singer rephrases a haiku by Zen Preist Kobayashi Issa’s haiku to : “In the light of the moon, there is no such thing as a stranger”. With the support of Muse Contemporary , curated by Sinan Polvan and under the patronage of the Fatih Municipality, Singer produced this project at the Yedikule Hisarı as an official collateral project of the 17th Istanbul Biennale. Film by Jip Mus Sound by Ayrton Speet Production and special thanks to Bert de Liefde About the Yedikule Hisarı, Polvan writes: One of Istanbul’s historic landmarks, “Yedikule Hisarı”, also known as the Yedikule Fortress or the Castle of the Seven Towers has a history as substantial as its massive structure. It dates from the late 4th century, when Theodosius the Great built a triumphal arch here. Later, when Theodosius II built his massive land walls, he incorporated the arch into the structure. Under the Romans, the great arch became known as the Porta Aurea(Golden Gate) and was used for triumphal state processions into and out of the city. For a time its gates were indeed plated with gold; the doorway was eventually sealed in the late Byzantine period. Four of the fortress’ seven towers were built as part of Theodosius II’s walls; the other three, which are inside the walls, were added by Mehmet the Conqueror. In Ottoman times the fortress was used for defence, as a repository for the Imperial Treasury, as a prison and as a place of execution. In times of war, ambassadors of ‘enemy’ countries to the Sublime Porte (the Ottoman prime ministry) often ended up incarcerated here. The plan of Yedikule reveals a strictly geometric outline of a pentagon, which is the starting point of an argument about the influence of Renaissance military architecture. In iconographic symbolism, the pentagon represents represents man, with her/his arms and legs stretched out.